When I Sing, Mountains Dance

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Poem for Me, Hilari” is one of several verses composed by the young poet, who like his father before him, composes poetry as he tills the land, never bothering to write any of it down. Hilari is one of many voices telling the story from different points of view. As he explains: “Poetry has to be full like a nightingale. Like morning. Like the thin air at dusk on its way to France. Or not. Or wherever it wants to go. I don’t have anything to write on, anyway, and no pencil.” There's no plot, the reader just follows along as some element from the last chapter becomes the focal point of the following chapter and through this string of connected slice-of-life moments, one learns about the entire region from people in town and the water nymphs in the mountains and the ghosts who wander. There's a whole gamut of emotions in each chapter and a wide range of personalities but it all comes together to create a kind of whimsical but somehow meaningful experience. To me..this slim book is very advance ….and of course I’m not the best person for the job of reading it….but I included my struggles… remembering I one of the little peas a part of the human race and we all have struggles…(reading this book might not be yours- but we all struggles with something)…. Central to the cosmology of Siberian hunting peoples such as the Even, and to hunter-gatherers in general, is a belief in the interconnectedness of relations between humans, animals and the landscape they share. (It should be pointed out that Martin’s book was titled Croire aux fauves — ‘To believe in wild beasts’ — in the original French, which gives a far better idea of what it is about than the rather anodyne or ambivalent In the Eye of the Wild.) Martin studied under the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, and her chosen area of study, like her mentor’s, is animism, which presupposes that all material phenomena have agency, and that there exists no categorical distinction between the invisible (including the so-called ‘spiritual’) and the material world, any more than there is between the world of humans, animals, and their shared environment. In an influential essay, the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, one of the foremost authorities on animism, has suggested that among hunters and gatherers there is little or no conceptual distance between ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’. ‘And indeed’, he goes on to say, ‘we find nothing corresponding to the Western concept of nature in hunter-gatherer representations, for they see no essential difference between the ways one relates to human and to non-human constituents of the environment.’ Needless to say, such a concept plays havoc with the established dichotomy between ‘humanity’, on the one hand, and ‘nature’ on the other. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ suggests that we do not consider ourselves, as humans, to be fully a part of it; and this disengagement lies at the very root of our current ecological crisis.

Blanca, your mother, wanted company. Before. And she went to find a man. And she found one. She found a strong man who worked in the fields… And they loved each other in the evenings, Blanca and your father, under the trees and upon the grass. Sometimes a book comes along that enhances your way of being in the world: for two such books to fall into your hands, in serendipitous collusion, is a thing to marvel at, and perhaps even to write about. Whatever their differences, and they are legion, the two books under review, both written by young women — one a memoir by an anthropologist, the other a piece of fiction that reads like a fable — together provide a thorough dismantling of the notion of genre. But more importantly, both books open a window onto systems of belief in which humans and other animals, plants, fungi and diverse organisms survive and thrive in interconnected and interdependent ways, consciously or otherwise, reflecting an unexpected harmony at the heart of lived experience. A little of this goes a long way, and then I wished the narrative would just get to the point. This is partly an issue of personal taste, but also a problem because the whole novel, which is meant to be polyphonic, is written in the same style and so different speakers don’t always have differentiated voices.

The wilderness in the context of the historical North American great outdoors has mostly been explained by white masculine voices and commonly focuses on macho white characters. As a consequence, the collective imaginary associated with this time and place often disregards and erases other points of view in this fabricated white-centric US west. In How Much of These Hills is Gold Zhang tells a story of endurance and survival during the California gold rush from the point of view of Lucy, a young girl of Chinese descent. Lucy’s lyrical and immersive voice invites the reader to reflect on whose stories have been told from this period and setting and whose have been neglected. They leave me standing in front of the bakery. There’s no note on the door. No obituary. Nothing. It’s a quarter after eleven. The butcher’s shop and the bakery are the only two stores in town. You can buy most anything at the butcher’s, milk and juice and even pasta and rice and wine. In the bakery there’s even more, it even has dish soap and scrubbers and mops.

Moving to impossible wildernesses, here is an architectural one. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi summons a world of endless interior halls filled with sculptures, with an open sky and tidal floods. As with The Vorrh, a prolonged stay in the halls seems to have a crippling psychological effect on humans. As Piranesi, its ever-cheerful main character, writes: “May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty”. The vorrh, in Catling’s The Vorrh trilogy, is a very ancient forest, so old that it’s thought of as being home to the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve roam along with cyclops and anthropophagi (cannibal rogues that attract humans deep into the forest with pails of water and food). This forest is in itself an entity that has sentience and perhaps even a will, and it rejects the presence of humans by driving them insane. When I Sing, Mountains Dance may leave you baffled at first. So, again, approach it not as a novel but as a celebration of language and inventiveness. It’s not quite poetry, not quite narrative, but rather a mélange of the two; a distinctive set of voices and narratives that somehow merges into a whole. And as in all good but challenging literature, meaning eventually arises like the mist lifting on a fresh, dewy morn to reveal a hidden landscape of preternatural, previously unknown beauty.Estar acompañada de Bon Iver mientras leía ha sido la guinda del pastel ¿Puede haber un grupo más evocador, melancólico y bonito? Given I’m serving time ‘healing’ a soleus calf muscle….on walking-punishment-time-out…I can sit around all day and read my little heart out…. Al mismo tiempo, me ha recordado a mi infancia, mi tierra -Donosti-, al Monte Urgull desde el que se ven las playas de mi adorada San Sebastián, el Igueldo y las rutas por el Monte Ulia (uno de mis favoritos). The writing is gorgeous….tender, dense, lyrical, poetic, and violent…..with an assortment of styles…a medley of sorts. La lectura es algo muy personal; hay libros que pasan sin pena ni gloria y otros sin embargo cautivan de una manera inesperada, y no sabes explicar por qué. Este, es uno de ellos. « ... a veces la belleza deja sin aire», no hay frase mejor para describir mi experiencia con este libro.

Originally published in Catalan in 2019 it was translated into Spanish and the English translation will come out in March. The Catalan and Spanish editions by Anagrama have the beautiful Age of Mammals mural in the Yale Peabody museum on the cover and it fits very well. I had started reading it in Spanish last year but the language is too poetic for a non-native speaker to fully enjoy. I thought the translation does a very good job, and it won't have been straightforward. The text cited by Tim Ingold appears in the essay ‘From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations’, in Ingold’s book The Perception of the Environment, London: Routledge, 2000.) In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis, NY: New York Review of Books, 2021. I thought the writing was lovely, sometimes archaic, sometimes very current. If I was this overwhelmed with a translation, I can't even imagine how stunning it is in Catalan which you can hear a snippet of here. El verdadero protagonista, pese a la multitud de narradores, sigue siendo el paisaje. La montaña, con su fauna y su flora. La propia naturaleza. El resto, es un mero instrumento para Irene. Herramientas que sirven para reflejar la ruralidad de un pueblecito de montaña como Camprodon y evocar todas esas vidas que algunos no sentimos tan lejanas. Quizá no similares, porque están inspiradas y ancladas en la región Pirenaica, pero si cercanas en sentimiento. El escenario sobre el que contar leyendas y tradiciones, historias de espíritus y de brujas. Pero también de personas. De muertes trágicas y familias destrozadas. De amores y desamores. De triunfos y derrotas. De oportunidades y condenas. Un relato que refleja eso de que el tiempo pasa, pero a veces no olvida.It begins with the thunderstorm, gleeful to be controlling the actions of all life below as it comes barreling through the region. While it's doing its stormy thing, one of its lightnings is attracted by a shiny knife and strikes a man right through his head while trying to get to the metal blade. He dies. Four dead witches watch and take the chanterelles he'd been collecting while out on a poetry walk (he was a poet who recited all his poems to open spaces, never writing them down) but had dropped when he died. Slowly, the story unfolds, each chapter like a small symphony. The clouds carry a storm, and within the storm a lightning bolt that strikes a man dead. The man, Domènec, has been collecting chanterelle mushrooms and attempting to rescue a calf that was tangled in wire. He leaves behind a widow, Sió, and two small children; daughter Mia, and son Hilari, the latter only two months old. After the villagers take away Domènec’s burnt body and plant a cross in the place the lightning drilled into him, the witches drop by from time to time and piss on the cross. Such is their role; to sully and enliven, to corrupt and to enhance. The coiled snails shuddered in their secluded homes, godless and without a prayer, knowing that if they didn’t drown, they would emerge redeemed to breathe the dampness in.